The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  PRAISE FOR THE RATTLED BONES

  “The feminist ghost story you’ve been waiting for.”

  —Bustle

  “Equal parts beautiful and chilling, Shannon M. Parker’s sophomore novel will sweep you away to the icy waters and small coastal towns of Maine, where the past refuses to be ignored and family secrets are dredged to the surface with the day’s catch. Unputdownable, and like the roar of the sea once you’ve heard it, unforgettable.”

  —Sarah Glenn Marsh, author of Fear the Drowning Deep

  “A beautiful, mournful tale of a grieving young woman who faces, with courage and empathy, the dark secrets of her family’s history and the unknown terrain of her future. The Rattled Bones is utterly steeped in the atmosphere and hardships of life on the Maine coast, exploring a shameful and little-known episode of American history with unflinching honesty and obvious respect.”

  —Kali Wallace, author of The Memory Trees

  “The Rattled Bones is like a ghost story told around a bonfire on a cold northern beach. This exquisite, stormy mystery and its seafaring heroine will keep you reading long into the night.”

  —Rebecca Podos, author of The Mystery of Hollow Places

  “In The Girl Who Fell, Shannon Parker established herself as a master at weaving a compelling story in a high stakes, thrilling ride of a read. She does it again, superbly, in The Rattled Bones, where a haunting on the Maine coastline blurs the line between sanity and madness.”

  —Karen Fortunati, author of The Weight of Zero

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  For my sons.

  The story of how you walked into my life will always be the greatest story I could ever tell.

  BEFORE

  My mother had been pacing the lip of the ocean for hours, talking to the Water People the way she did. They tended to visit when the fog rose high, and the fog always rose high when my mother neared the sea.

  On the back deck, I leaned against my gram’s chest as we watched my mother patrol the slice of shore where the waves met our backyard. Her long yellow skirt was wet at the bottom, the waterline crawling up the cloth as she walked back and forth and then back again. Her skirt held the brightest glow under the stars, and the light made six-year-old me wonder if my mother carried the moon tucked under her heart.

  I didn’t tell Gram how I squinted my eyes to try to see the Water People. I didn’t tell her how much I wanted to run to my mother on nights like this, pull her away from the spell of the people who visited with the mist.

  I wanted to talk to the people who lived in the ocean and I wanted to hear the words they spoke in whispers carried on waves. Because then I could tell them to go away, that my mother didn’t need them.

  But no one ever heard their voices.

  No one but my mother.

  I watched her pluck small stones from the band of foamy sea spit, collecting jewels from the deep. My blood ran with excitement, wanting her to come to the deck and show me all the rocks made glossy from the lick of seawater, give them to me like gifts. She’d tell me of their origin and how they were millions of years old, once trampled on by dinosaurs, squeezed by continents of ice. Sometimes we would find broken glass, pieces soft at the edges thanks to time and the rolling current. We would talk about the story of the glass, how a great ship lost an exotic perfume container to the sea, its purple shell shattering into treasure of a different kind.

  Then there were the broken bits of potter’s clay my mother would tuck against her breast, as if holding these shards could make the pottery whole again. She told me tales of how the Water People left their pots behind. She knew everything about the Water People, and I was both jealous and frightened.

  But my mother never showed me the rocks that day. As I waited, Gram’s body went rigid behind me. It felt as if her heart had stopped, as if she froze still. I wondered if she finally saw the Water People too. But Gram rose too quickly, dumping me from her lap. I knew then that my world was turning over. My gram didn’t bend to me to see if I was okay. She only said one word. Tossed into the ocean, a skipping stone.

  No!

  Just that one word, but it seemed so loud over the waves, over the breathing of the sea. The small lonely word thumped inside of me, replacing my heartbeat. No. No. No. I didn’t chase after Gram as she darted into the house. I heard the frantic hum of her words spoken into the phone in our kitchen.

  I stayed watching my mother hunt for larger rocks to add to the pockets of her long skirt. How my mother bunched the skirt at her waist as the elastic band began to slide at her hips. I could see the weight of the rocks was almost too much to bear. And I watched her walk straight into the waves with all that weight on her body, with so much purpose in her every step. I thought she might go into the sea and bring the Water People back for me.

  But it was Gram who brought my mother back. She ran out of our house, across the lawn. Gram dove into the midnight water and drew my mother from the grip of the deep. She wrestled her to shore and rocked her daughter’s wet limbs in the cradle of her own body. My mother curled her long legs so tightly to her chest, as if she wanted them to disappear. My mother still called to the sea from the safety of Gram’s arms, her words wet and distant.

  My mother and Gram stayed locked together like that for so long I thought the sun might have enough time to rise, push away the moon. But I couldn’t watch for the sun. I kept my eyes on my mother as she eyed the sea. Knowing, without anyone telling me, that she wanted to be with the Water People more than she wanted to be with me. Fear crept inside of me then, a dark eel slicking through my veins.

  After Gram walked my mother to the ambulance, she came to hold me once again, wrapping me close enough to sync our fears. I pressed into the thundering wail of her heartbeat.

  I told Gram I would never need the people from the deep.

  Gram promised she would never leave me.

  I latched tight to her promise.

  As the sirens faded in the distance, I burrowed hard against my gram so that no one could climb between us, separate my heart from hers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There is no name for what I am.

  Boys have their choice of titles—lobsterman, sternman, fisherman—but since I’m a girl, I am none of these. My gender isn’t welcome at sea, which is ridiculous since no one is more tied to the moon and the ocean than a female. But maritime lore has always claimed that a girl on a ship is bad luck, even though nearly every sailor in the history of braving the ocean has named his boat after a girl. Men even invented the mermaid to feel safer at sea.

  I’ll always defend my right to fish the water.

  But today I don’t want to be here.

  I nudge my wrist forward, pressing against the throttle to make the Rilla Brae quicken. My lobster boat—the one Dad named for me—cuts a certain path through the rough, curling Maine water. The morning fog parts as I push against its thickness, the displaced mist twisting into thin gray fingers, beckoning me toward deeper waters.

  I go because I have to.

  Because it’s what my father would have wanted.

  I steer toward the swath of ocean my family has fished for generations while the GPS bleeps out navigation points. I silence the machine and its piercing electronic pulses because I don’t need technology to find the s
tring of lobster traps my father set into the deep three days ago—his last day on earth. The watery pathway leading to the Gulf of Maine is an artery I’ve traveled since before I could crawl. Its inlets are as recognizable—as memorable—as the laugh lines that track around my father’s eyes.

  Tracked.

  The VHF radio above my head wakes with static before I hear Reed’s voice. “All in, Rilla Brae?”

  I pull down the mouthpiece and press the side button to talk. “All in.” It’s the same response I always give Reed when he checks in on my fishing. All in. These two words let him know I’m on the water. That I’m all right and that I love him—things you need a code for when talking over a public channel.

  A wave of static and then, “Charlotte Anne, out at Lip Gulley, watching for you, Rilla Brae.” The voice is Billy Benson’s, captain of the Charlotte Anne—a vessel named for his wife—and I’m not sure if he’s watching for me or my boat or both. I don’t have time to respond before Emmet Teale’s call comes across the wire: “Maddie Jean, good to hear ya on the line, Rilla Brae.”

  “Heavy seas today. Keep beam to.” George Mank, telling me to keep my boat perpendicular to the swells, even though I know what he’s really telling me. How all the fishermen are using their own kind of code to say the hard things.

  I press the VHF button and ask: “You boys gonna tie up this channel all day with this lovefest?”

  Being a wiseass might be the most sacred language among us on the water. It tells the men that I’m okay, even if I’m not.

  The radio chirps with a lighter chatter about weather and bait prices as I slow near a green-and-orange buoy bobbing with our family’s fishing colors. Dad, Gram, and I spent the winter painting all eight hundred of our Styrofoam buoys—a thick horizontal stripe of orange crossed with a thin vertical strip of green. The specific colors and design mark our traps. My traps now. Every fishing family knows each other by the colored pattern of their buoys. Just as every fishing family knows it’s forbidden to set one’s traps in another family’s fishing grounds. It’s a hard thing to think I’m a fishing family of one now. Well, me and Gram. But Gram doesn’t go out on the water anymore.

  I flick the throttle to neutral and step outside the wheelhouse to cast my hook, spearing the buoy rope on the first try. I pull the lobster line manually—old-school—straining the muscles in my arms and back to coax the metal crate from the bottom of the sea. It rises inch by inch through the layers of water as I work the wet rope through my hands.

  My arms tire quickly.

  The soggy, slack rope curls into a sleeping snake behind my feet as the corner of the first lobster trap breaks the water. Its green metal edge winks against the gray waves as it sloughs off excess water. My heart stutters as I hold the trap at the waterline, unable to let it fully break the surface.

  “This is the moment,” he’d say, and I’d watch my dad’s frame swell with hope for the catch, each trap a new gift. “What treasure will the sea bestow upon us?”

  I want to hold the trap suspended like this for the rest of time, feel my father’s enthusiasm here with me. But of course I can’t. I reach for the trap, insert my gloved fingers into the wire mesh, and wrestle the cage onto the deck.

  And then a smile crests on my lips. A pop of laughter jumps from inside of me.

  Because the trap is full and it feels like a gift from my dad.

  I cast my eyes to the sky to thank him, even if I wasn’t raised to believe in heaven or happily ever afters.

  * * *

  By the time I reset my string of a hundred pots and deliver my catch to the fisheries co-op, the sun has bullied away the fog and swallowed every drop of cool air. I shed my heavy rubber overalls and strip down to my everyday uniform of leggings and a plain white tee. I turn my course toward home, where Gram will be waiting.

  Only Gram.

  I raise my face to the sun to let its warmth reach inside of me, stretch into my bones. I keep my hips pressed against the boat’s steering wheel, coasting in the sea that has calmed now. My reliable engine hums as I watch the sleek missile dive of an oil-black cormorant. The bird retrieves a fish from the water and spreads her wings against the blue-and-white marble sky as she flies off with her breakfast.

  Life and death in a heartbeat.

  The bird disappears into the thick green tree line of a nearby island just as my boat lurches to a violent stop, pitching me forward. My hip bone slams against the corner of the instrument panel and pain sears along the length of my body, hot as fire. At the back of the boat, my engine misfires with a shotgun blast that raises thunder in my heart. Then the engine dies.

  Leaving me bobbing, alone at sea without power.

  Every mariner’s nightmare.

  I scan the console, but it’s darkened to black. No electricity. No VHF. I throw the motor into neutral and crank the key. The engine doesn’t speak. The boat tumbles with the sway of the waves. I try the key again. Nothing. And no cell reception along this waterway.

  I draw in a deep breath. I know this boat. I’ve got this.

  Except, maybe I don’t.

  I move to the engine at the back. I run my fingers along the fuel lines, testing every valve, every connection. The fuel filter’s clean. No broken belts, no blown hoses. I straighten, mystified. And that is when Malaga Island draws my full attention—or rather, the small wooden boat resting at its shore. The empty skiff is old, its paint beaten bare from Maine’s harsh seasons. But who does it belong to? And can they give me help if I need it?

  Help. Something I’ve never been good at asking for.

  The current pushes me closer to the uninhabited island, which isn’t much more than a rough mound of stone. The island’s trees are thick green spruce, with pointed, triangle tips that gobble up the sunlight. Tufts of fennel grass cling for life along the rough, small beach. And then, a figure.

  A girl.

  Maybe my age.

  She is bent and focused as if rubbing something against the rocks. Her dark braids slip over her sharp shoulders as she leans forward, pulls back. Rhythmically. Expertly.

  I wave, but the girl doesn’t look up.

  I call to her, my hands cupped around my cry. “Hello!” I fan my arm again, cutting a single arc through the air. The girl doesn’t respond. I stare at her too-long dress, its white lace seeming so out of place.

  The air buckles, allowing a cold current to sweep across the water. The wind has the bite of winter in its breath, too icy for June. My skin blooms with gooseflesh.

  Then I hear her.

  The girl raises a song over the pounding waves, a low and mournful melody that lifts louder as she presses forward and back, her eyes never leaving her task. Her tune sounds like a lullaby from my childhood. Maybe something Gram would hum as she cradled me in her rocking-chair lap. Or is it from the forgotten depths of days when my mother lived here? Did my mother know this song? Sing it to me?

  My memory can’t pull up the words, but it doesn’t matter.

  Because it feels like the girl is singing for my loss.

  I call to her again. “Hello!” My yell is primal, and I’m not entirely sure it has anything to do with my need to be rescued. When she looks up I see her brown face, her large eyes finding me. Do I know this girl? A word forms on her wide mouth, but the shrill bleat of an air horn devours all other sound. I startle and turn.

  Old Man Benner’s slick new lobster boat—appropriately named Pretty Penny—putters beside mine, dwarfing the Rilla Brae. He cups one hand around his mouth and calls, “Ya’s all right, Rilla?”

  “Fine.” The lie is quick and spiteful. I’d rather swim home than accept help from Reed’s grandfather, but I hear my dad’s words: “You get farther with sugar than you do with spice, sunfish.” I throw a forced smile.

  “Glad ta see ya pulling them pots.” Now it’s his turn to lie. Only one morning after Dad’s death, Old Man Benner called Gram to bully me off our fishing grounds. I listened with my head pressed to hers, our ears tented o
ver the kitchen wall’s landline receiver. When I heard Old Man Benner’s dense Maine accent spit out the words “Ayuh. Ocean’s no place for a girl,” I hung up on him, leaving me alone with Gram and her stern stare. I set twice as many traps into the deep that day.

  “Sorry again ’bout ya father.” Old Man Benner’s tongue is thick with Maine, making father sound like fath-ah. It’s the regional accent Dad trained out of me from the first words I spoke. Not because he was ashamed of our roots, but because he knew it would mark me, and he wanted me to make my mark on the world instead.

  “Need anything?” Old Man Benner calls.

  A tow. My father. I need to believe I didn’t fail Dad on his last day, the way his heart did. I slide my dignity down where I can’t hear its protest and move to the rail. A request for help sits on my lips, but my pride won’t give it sound. “I’m all set.” Another lie.

  “Ya shouldn’t be out he-ah, Rilla.” Benner sucks on a toothpick, teetering it between his teeth. “No sayin’ what could happen to a girl alone.”

  The threat smacks me hard enough to rattle my head. My blood thickens with hate. “I’ll keep that in mind.” I stretch my arm toward him, hold up my open palm when I want to hold up my middle finger. He laughs at my fisherman’s—fishergirl’s?—wave, jimmying that gnawed toothpick deep in his bite.

  My wave is enough to make him move on, and I flip him the bird once he’s passed. His boat stirs a wake that leaves me bobbing in giant man-made swells. When the sea settles, I try the key again. Nothing. It’s okay, I tell myself. I’ll ask the girl for help. It’ll be easy. People ask for assistance all the time. I reach for a rag under the console, find a white square of torn sheet and raise it over my head, readying to wave the international distress signal.

  But the girl is gone. I trade the SOS cloth for my binoculars and scan the island.

  She is nowhere.

  I settle into the captain’s chair—my chair now.